Going Backward to Move Forward: Karen Tei Yamashita in Conversation with Boreth Ly on "Traces of Trauma"
Karen Tei Yamashita: In many ways this conversation between us started many, many years ago.
Boreth Ly: Yes—it was at your home in Santa Cruz, California, in your kitchen. A conversation we had over a lavish breakfast you cooked for us.
Yamashita: So it was. And at that time I also invited three scholars of ancient philosophy and culture. All were classical scholars. I thought that maybe you would have some kind of conversation between you, and I would sit there and get the benefit of it: Gildas Hamel, who is a scholar of ancient Palestine; Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, whose research focuses on classical Greek and Sanskrit literature; and you, Boreth Ly, on ancient Hindu and Buddhist arts of Southeast Asia.
Ly: I remember we had a conversation centered on the question of forgiveness. We explored how cultures have different terms/words for this idea, concept, and process in varied languages. You and I also share a love for the late Toni Morrison’s writings, and we have spoken at length about her lecture on forgiveness, a talk that she gave in Santa Cruz in 2014. Forgiveness is a very important topic, but we don’t have time to go into detail on this theme here. My French and Cambodian friends and colleagues in France are also very interested in forgiveness, so perhaps we can revisit this topic together in the near future.
Yamashita: Can you tell us about your personal journeys to your scholarship and to your research interests?
Ly: I began my academic career writing about ancient Hindu and Buddhist arts of Southeast Asia, especially visual narratives of the Hindu epics The Mahabharata and The Ramayana on ancient Khmer stone temples. However, since I am a survivor of the genocide in Cambodia, that atrocity and its traumatic legacy have always loomed in the background—haunting me. I knew that I had to confront that topic eventually, but I repressed it in order to survive my initial displacement as a refugee in the United States.
As I mentioned in the preface to my book, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide [University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020], in the early 2000s I began to write about my memory, history, and experience of trauma under the Khmer Rouge regime and how that intersected with my melancholia in the United States. This long predated the current popularity of refugee studies. In fact, one of the first essays that addressed the loss of my close family members and childhood was published in a 2003 issue of Art Journal: “Devastated Vision(s): The Khmer Rouge Scopic Regime in Cambodia.” I went on “to experiment with experience,” to borrow a phrase from the English novelist Jeanette Winterson. However, I encountered great discouragement from some of my colleagues in the field of Southeast Asian art history. One of them said that the insertion of my voice interrupted the discussion of—and thus blocked serious analysis of—art objects in the text. After reading “Devastated Vision(s),” another colleague in Southeast Asian studies said, “It is all about Boreth Ly.” By that she meant that I was commodifying my own life, memory, and history. In brief, they found my writing too personal and autobiographical. I am not surprised in retrospect; art historians are academically trained to write “objectively” about the lives of objects and quite often never question their strange fetish for objects, especially art objects from another culture. It really resonates with what the late Edward Said said, in 1978 book, Orientalism: “The East is a career”—a parasitic career.
I mention the discouraging remarks from these two colleagues not because they stopped me, but to create a safe and healthy space for my students and colleagues who might have shared similar experiences. I want people to be able to make sense of their own lives, history, and memory and the art objects that they chose to write about. Moreover, it is my way of reclaiming our humanity and dignity that was discouraged, dehumanized, and erased in the names of science, scholarly conventions, and “objective” styles of discourse. Indeed, our lives matter!
Readers will see that my voice and perspective on the historical events, artists, and art objects form the bookends to the five chapters situated in between. And my voice can be heard like a ghost guide in the background, haunting the pages in different chapters.
I have come full circle because my earlier writings on the two Hindu epics, especially The Mahabharata, helped me think through issues such as collective and individual courses of action and the consequences that are imposed on the collective and vice versa. After all, the philosophical underpinnings of these epic poems are about ethics, morality, conflict, and reconciliation. I was delighted to learn from an interview with the theater director Peter Brook that his film adaptation of The Mahabharata was inspired by the conflict over the Vietnam-American War.
Last, as I also point out in my book—the compartmentalization and periodization of art history and focus of the discipline is very Western. It is ironic because the term “interdisciplinary” has been discussed in European American approaches to the study of art history, and yet there are so many constraints and boundaries imposed upon our approaches to writing about art, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and race.
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